In terms of balanced growth, the US is the strongest economy in the world right now.
Here are a few charts that show the state of investment around the world. The data, taken from FRED, shows the percentage change in trailing twelve month real gross fixed capital formation from 1Q 2000 levels.
Continue reading… “The state of investments around the world: Charts”
Breakthrough technologies and new destinations will shape the global travel industry by 2024.
Skyscanner, a travel booking site, released a report earlier this year predicting what travel will be like in 2024. Skyscanner teamed up with 56 experts to analyze and present the breakthrough technologies and exciting new destinations that will shape the global travel industry over the next ten years.
Continue reading… “Top 3 ways travel is going to be different in 2024”
Facebook internet delivery drone.
Facebook is pushing toward thousands of solar-powered internet delivering drones. They will have the wingspan of a jumbo jet and fly at 17 mile height. The semi-autonomous drones will be the size of jumbo jets which will fly 17 miles above the Earth to provide wireless internet access to the four billion people currently unable to get online. They want to fly them for months and years at a time. The drones will need to rise above the weather, flying at between 60,000 and 90,000 feet – around 17 miles above the ground.
Continue reading… “Facebook’s solar-powered internet delivering drones could be in use by 2018”
Google Chairman Eric Schmidt
Eric Schmidt, Google’s Chairman, wants to play nice with the European Union, but he isn’t about to give in to calls for regulation. “Europe needs to accept and embrace disruption. The old ways of doing things need to face competition that forces them to innovate,” he wrote in an op-ed for Digital Minds for a New Europe, the European Commission’s new tech series. “Uber, for example, is shaking up the taxi market — for the good. It offers riders convenience and cheaper fares. Understandably, the incumbent taxi industry is unhappy.”
If we could make the process more efficient, scientists estimate we could increase yields by 36 to 60 percent.
What if we ended up with 50% more rice and wheat by using the same amount of water and fertilizer? Sound impossible? No, just some chemistry and genetic engineering. Scientists have recently figured out the second of three steps to make photosynthesis a whole lot more efficient in plants.
Continue reading… “Scientists reinventing photosynthesis to feed the world”
Larry Page
Larry Page’s ambitions are huge. He has Google working on self-driving cars, artificial intelligence, robots, aging, and drones. At Google, they call these efforts moonshots.
Humans have been migrating around the planet in great numbers since they first left Africa 60,000 years ago. The advent of international borders certainly did not stop global migration. Although the percentage of the world’s people living outside of their birth countries has remained steady in recent decades, the world’s increasing population means that the sheer number of international migrants has never been higher.
Continue reading… “Top 7 facts about world migration”
Here’s a map where all devices on the internet are located.
The Internet consists of a vast series of tubes, computers, and devices networked together sharing the same information. But where are all those pieces of hardware located?
Continue reading… “A map of all the pinged devices on the internet”
In the last ten years, the increase in global imbalances has posed a theoretical challenge for international macroeconomics. Why did some less-developed countries with a higher need for capital, like China, lend to richer countries?
Continue reading… “Why some poorer countries lend to richer countries”
Does a greater number of years in school mean more learning?
When you compare education systems around the world to see what’s working and what isn’t, one of the metrics we often see is ‘school life expectancy.’ This is known as how many years students go to school. We most often assume that students go to school for at least 13 years (K-12), plus “some” college or post high school education in the U.S. In schools in developing countries, we hear about children who can’t go to school past a young age (sometimes around 8 years old) because they need to make money for their family’s survival, because they don’t have the opportunity to do so, because of their gender, or because it would be dangerous or prohibitively expensive to do so.
Continue reading… “How much time do students spend in classrooms worldwide?”
There are only two types of people in the world: cat people and dog people. Data from Euromonitor, a market research firm, suggest that these differences extend beyond individual preferences and to the realm of geopolitics: it turns out there are cat countries and dog countries, too. (Video)
Continue reading… “Where cats are more popular than dogs around the world”
Finland has a staggering record of education success.
Pasi Sahlberg, a Finnish educator and scholar, is one of the world’s leading experts on school reform and educational practices. He is the author of the best-selling “Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn About Educational Change in Finland?”and a former director general of Finland’s Center for International Mobility and Cooperation. Sahlberg is now a visiting professor of practice at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He has written a number of important posts for this blog, including “What if Finland’s great teachers taught in U.S. schools,” and “What the U.S. can’t learn from Finland about ed reform.”
By delving into the futuring techniques of Futurist Thomas Frey, you’ll embark on an enlightening journey.
Learn More about this exciting program.